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This is Jenna Barry at Medford Public Library in Medford, Massachusetts. The date is December 5, 2024. I'm here with former Mayor Michael McGlynn, and we're gonna talk about him growing up on Cushing Street. Cushing Street was part of a great neighborhood. There were hundreds of kids

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that lived in our neighborhood, and we lived, our neighborhood was defined by certain things. To our north was railroad tracks. And they they during my youth. Those tracks were still going and then they was they used for uh helping to build Route 93. Then you had

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the bottomless pit, which is where Budweiser is now located. And then on the. What do you mean by the bottomless pit? There was a big pit that it it always was known as a bottomless pit. It was fenced off. No one was ever allowed to go

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there. We're all forbidden as children to go to the tracks, go to the pit. On the other side, we had the, uh, Mystic River, and then on the 4th side was the construction of Route 93. So all the street, uh, the streets were our, our parks

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in addition to the parks that we had, but that's where you played street hockey, that's where you played football, uh, for what all year round, and, uh, we were all close. Close neighbors. Um, as a matter of fact, my wife lived a couple of doors down

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from me. And uh I told her that I went to her uh Chrissie when I was 4 months old. Uh I I made that part up though. Uh, and many of my cousins live there. Uh, both sets of my grandparents lived there. And there was just

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so much to do. One of the, one of the big things, another attraction that we were not supposed to go to where the McGlynn and Leandro schools are now at home Stadium. The land was taken in 1932 by the state for a dollar. And eminent domain.

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Yes, and It was used to for when part of the construction of '93, some of the exits off the expressways to all the dirt was dumped there and it just piled up and piled up, um, and it used to be a place where there was at

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the end of Foster Court, right, um. Yet there was a an oxbow which used to be TJ Foster's shipbuilding yard many years ago and they just filled that in so there's no more oxbow there and and anything and. In the winter, Just before the winter, it

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would fill with water at the top, not not deep. But enough that when it would freeze. You'd see kids walking with skates on everywhere across the street to just climb up the little mountains and then skate there and that's where a lot of us learned how

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to skate. But in the summer it had obnoxious smells, gaseous odors. Remember there was no EPA until the 1970s. So, um, that was one of the reasons my father first got into government because of, of that issue. Um, in my, uh, he ran for the city

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council and obviously he was mayor and state representative. Um, my godfather, who was named after, he had a house where Uh, his daughter grew up on Maverick Street, Marilyn Parico, who became the mayor. Um, and my godfather was also a state representative. So they were all

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very active in trying to get that cleaned up many years ago before I came along before the. Um, you know, there was today's park that is there. And um They were able to get stuff done. And then When I came along, it was a time for

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Rehabbing of Um, the fields and the pit and the dump where people would just dump whatever they want to dump behind Foster, uh, Lake Guard Drive, Rockwell Ave. And eventually there was a developer there which is now Mystic Valley Place. And then there was talk of

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the the stadium which was built and you know things have gone very well. For a lot of years, I think back now, that was what, 60s or 70s. And since that time, on a lot of the, we went in with. The labor unions again, to rebuild

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all those stands in that that stadium with public private partnerships. So people were not paying for any of these improvements that were happening. And then when we were building the schools. Um, People were looking for sites. Someplace where you wouldn't have to disrupt the neighborhood when

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you're tearing down one school, building another school, and some of us said, why not Hormel Stadium and they said, well, it's not our land. So we went in to petition. To take that land And Tom Riley was the attorney general at the time, former district attorney

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in in Middlesex County. And people from as far away as the Berkshires. Came to protest. The given away of the land or for letting it be further disrupted because they said that's where the buffalo roll. Well, Because my father, my godfather, and everyone was in in

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the government, I had the old pictures. Of how bad things looked, so there were no buffalo here. And uh we went into the attorney General. And the attorney general. Decided with the city of Medford. I filed legislation. And uh we took the land and and Tom

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Riley was was excellent. He said, what do you think is a fair price for the. The land I said I'm gonna give you back the buck that you took from us. Uh, or that, that, that you gave us back in 32, you said, fair deal then

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we passed the legislation um and, and we got it now. Remember EPA 70s, this is late 90s, um there was still at that time already a section that had been uh sectioned off because of contamination and we went to the commissioner David Balfour, great guy, uh,

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MDC commissioner, and uh we said this is your land you must have contaminated it somehow. We need you to pay to pay, uh, clean the whole thing up. And MDC came in and they cleaned up all the land. So then we said, hmm, now we got

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a place to build the schools. So, um, Then we went into the school building process. Let's stop here and do another section just on the rebuilding of the schools. Although I did want to just circle back one time and say, did you ever sneak into the

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pit when you were a kid? Hm. At the pit, the railroad tracks, the, uh, all of them, I would say we were all guilty. But Until The mothers in the neighborhood. Had the tightest knit group. If we stepped in one of those areas, the call went

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through to your mother. They all know each other. Uh, so once we knew the FBI was watching us, that. Moms are good like that. Very good.